MozCamp EU Berlin & Next step for BabelZilla

Learning and meeting

I have been lucky enough to be invited to MozCamp Europe in Berlin last week-end and enjoyed the meeting very much on every aspect: have a better insight of what is cooking in Mozilla headquarters, discover amazing projects, having fun together, but above all I am glad I met people in real life and in some cases have an interesting discussion about addons localization on BabelZilla.
First of all, I was very glad to meet our good old Jürgen Berg aka Fenian. It was the first time we met in real life, though we have been working and communicating together on a daily basis for 6 years. I also met for the first time Lakrits who is at the moment our top contributor translating for Swedish, the old-timer teo who is translating for Polish, was pleased to meet again George (aka Sonickydon) from Greece and some others whose face and nick are now familiar to me. I really hope we shall have another occasion to meet other BabelZillians in the future.

Talking about addons localization

A significant number of various sessions were focussing on addons and localization at this MozCamp, which is but justified, considering addons are crucial for the browser, whether they are for old desktop or for mobile which is now major battlefield for Mozilla.
Among various sessions, I attended this very interesting one about the way Jetpacks would be localized in the future. As JSON was a candidate for file format, it seems the community discussion lead to some other localizer-friendly choice. We shall see how our own system can parse this kind of files, but it seems rather easy to handle.
I also gave a short presentation about the current state and issues on BabelZilla and what our goals for next steps are.
You can have slides here. There were a couple of questions and a very grateful Ken Barbalace (the developer of the Classic Compact Options extension), then it was time to leave room for Adofex, (demo) which can be the next step for BabelZilla, replacing gradually our good old WTS. Don’t be afraid, transition will be scheduled smoothly, some key features we currently enjoy on BabelZilla are still to be ported or implemented on Adofex, but hey Tim will develop his already smart tool to be tested and used on BabelZilla, so that you the user community, whether you are newcomers or old-timers, can provide useful feedback and help us create the best possible system together. Also, he would be glad to receive your feedback on the talk and the teams organization.
Tim will soon post here and explain what the interest of Adofex is for Babelzilla and which will be his next step on development. Stay tuned!